Courtesy of Slate:TRUMP to HELLER: "Look, he wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?" http://pic.twitter.com/LFiwuEY693— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) July 19, 2017
President Donald Trump invited the Republican Senate caucus to lunch to talk about health care on Wednesday. The goal of the lunch was kind of a mystery, considering that enough Republican Senators have already come forward to torpedo both Trump’s signature effort to repeal and replace Obamacare with a program that would cost tens of millions of people their insurance, as well as his back up plan of just repealing it outright in a way that would cost more than 30 million people their insurance.
It turned out that Trump had brought them to the White House to try to browbeat and harangue recalcitrant Senators into changing their mind. The most emphatic example of this attempted bullying came with Trump's treatment of Nevada Sen. Dean Heller. The seating arrangements conveniently placed Heller, one of the earliest Senators to come out publicly and vociferously against the initial Senate health care bill, next to the president. This offered the insult comic in chief the opportunity to come up with a singularly awkward gibe.
As it turns out Heller's seat is especially vulnerable, so Trump putting a target on his back should be especially troubling to Mitch McConnell and the GOP.
Besides Heller was not one of the Republican Senators who actually torpedoed the health care plan:
What's especially fun about this is that Heller wasn't even one of the Senators to come out and kill the revised version of the bill, nor did he kill the backup plan of repealing Obamacare without a replacement. That was Sens. Susan Collins, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Jerry Moran in the first instance, and Sens. Collins, Shelley Moore Capito, and Lisa Murkowski in the latter.
Murkowski, by the way, was sitting several seats over on Trump's left, looking decidedly uncomfortable and completely unconvinced by his pathetic sales pitch.
And what a pitch it was. When Trump was not threatening or shaming the Republican Senators he was outright lying to the American people.
Trump listed off a number of bald faced lies about a bill that it is clear he has never read, including that it will cover more Americans, bring insurance costs down, and still cover all preexisting conditions.
The bill will do none of that, however it will will gut $772 billion in Medicaid funding over the next ten years which will imperil health care for millions of Americans including 5 million special needs children. And it will also kick tens of millions off of their health care plans.
Perhaps Donald Trump should try selling THAT to the American people?
Source http://ift.tt/2ubruck
